Thompson Labor Bounce Takes a Met-Like Hop

Those who subscribe to Damon Runyon's maxim that "the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet" would probably be going long on Mayor Bloomberg's re-election right about now.

Four weeks after a Quinnipiac University poll showed City Comptroller Bill Thompson narrowing the Mayor's lead to 20 points, its Aug. 26 survey of 1,290 registered city voters had the margin back up to 15 points. Mr. Bloomberg had gained three points, from 47 to 50, while Mr. Thompson's support had slipped from 37 to 35 from the previous poll.

"I hate to say it's all over; things happen," Mickey Carroll, the director of the Quinnipiac Polling Institute, told reporters at City Hall that morning. "But it's hard to talk about this race as if it's a real race" in which Mr. Thompson has a plausible shot of winning. "A, the other guy has the job, and B, there's a zillion-dollar difference."

Undecided or Unimpressed?

Pollsters generally consider the 50 percent mark an important threshold for obvious reasons, but the 15 percent who were undecided, coupled with the surprisingly large percentage of voters (51 percent) who say they don't know enough about Mr. Thompson to form an opinion, are numbers that suggest the Comptroller could pick up a significant share of those voters and perhaps sway a few now in the Mayor's camp.

AN OMINOUS SIGN, OR TOO SOON TO TELL?: The most-recent mayoral poll showed City Comptroller Bill Thompson (left) losing ground at a time when several union endorsements might have been expected to give him momentum in his uphill race against Mayor Bloomberg. Veteran union consultant Vincent Montalbano, a Thompson supporter, argued that if he sticks to his campaign plan, he has a realistic shot to turn the tide during the final weeks before the Nov. 3 vote.

Mr. Carroll didn't think so, however, saying, "My feeling is it won't grow tighter" between now and Election Day Nov. 3.

What seemed particularly ominous for Mr. Thompson was that there had been no apparent benefit for him from the District Council 37 endorsement Aug. 13, five days before Quinnipiac began its weeklong survey. The union's size and the fact that it had endorsed Mr. Bloomberg four years earlier carried potential significance for the Comptroller, signaling that labor was not conceding the contest was too one-sided to risk antagonizing an incumbent who has the potential to exact payback in the form of either layoffs or a rigid contract stance. (Mr. Thompson also picked up the endorsements of the Public Employees Federation and Communications Workers of America Local 1180 midway through the survey, but those were both announced on a Friday and got virtually no media coverage other than in this newspaper, which appeared a day after the poll was completed.)

Referring to DC 37 leaving Mr. Bloomberg's camp this time around, Mr. Carroll said, "This labor defection, is it going to cost him the election? No. Is it going to cost him a couple of points? Yes."

The Thompson campaign downplayed the lack of a labor bounce, with one adviser contending that it was too soon to expect the union endorsements would translate to member support. A statement issued by the Comptroller's campaign spokeswoman, Anne Fenton, focused on Mr. Bloomberg not topping 50 percent in the poll, saying he had "spent upwards of $50 million and he still does not have a majority of New Yorkers behind his attempt to buy another four years in City Hall."

It is generally believed that much of the public doesn't focus on political campaigns until after Labor Day, a tendency that figures to be even more pronounced this year because Mr. Thompson does not face serious opposition for the Democratic nomination.

Term Limits Rap Not Resonating

But Mr. Carroll seemed convinced that the strongest argument Mr. Thompson can launch against Mr. Bloomberg—that he shouldn't have usurped the will of the voters by persuading the City Council to extend term limits without the same kind of referendum that enacted and later upheld them —has already failed to have much impact.

He said Quinnipiac surveyed the voters' mood on the manner in which the Mayor got the law amended early in the contest and found, "A lot of people didn't like it, but they're still voting for him."

Questions in the latest poll about the Mayor's TV ad barrage seemed to suggest it had been counterproductive: by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, those surveyed described it as overkill, and a greater percentage said they were less likely to vote for Mr. Bloomberg as a result than the group contending it made them more likely to support him.

Yet 78 percent of those interviewed had seen the commercials, and the Mayor's expanding lead indicated that even if unconsciously, they were having a positive effect on voters' thinking. And so while Mr. Carroll noted that 47 percent had called the TV spots "annoying" while just 41 percent characterized them as "informative," his overall conclusion was, "He's got a zillion dollars and he's spending it wisely."

He also called it a negative from Mr. Thompson's standpoint that more than half those surveyed didn't know enough about him to form a clear opinion. Whether that is his own fault or a product of what Mr. Carroll— a former political reporter for the New York Times and Newsday, among other papers— called a decline in coverage of the Comptroller's Office by the city's media, it's not a good sign with just two months remaining before the vote.

"You look at the numbers and the structure of the campaign and say, jeez, that's one heavy lift," Mr. Carroll said.

Union officials, including a very important one who so far is neutral in the race, were less inclined to discount Mr. Thompson's chances at this point.

The 'Better Off Now' Question

"I still think it's early," said CWA Local 1180 President Arthur Cheliotes. "We've seen a lot of mail from Mike in our mailboxes. When we start looking at what's going on with Wall Street and our economy, we're going to be asking, what's he going to do in 12 years that he didn't do in eight?"

Dan Cantor, executive director of the union-backed Working Families Party, contended that labor endorsements' effects "aren't always immediate. When those boots start hitting the ground, going door-to-door and talking to voters about the issues that matter to New Yorkers, that's when you'll feel the impact."

United Federation of Teachers President Mike Mulgrew, whose union's decision on an endorsement could be complicated by the expiration of its current contract two weeks before Election Day said he believed the race was still too fluid to put much stock in a poll. He pointed out that Quinnipiac found that in the four-way Democratic primary race to succeed Mr. Thompson as Comptroller, "The leading vote-getter is not a person— it's a category." In that contest, 45 percent of those surveyed didn't know whom they would vote for, with three of the candidates getting either 16 or 17 percent of the vote.

"Going into the end of the race is when you're really going to see the movement," Mr. Mulgrew said.

That view is shared by Vinnie Montalbano, a former chief lobbyist for DC 37 and longtime labor consultant who is supporting Mr. Thompson. He said it didn't surprise him that at a time when the Comptroller might have been expected to get a "bump" from his labor endorsements, his support actually slipped.

'Just Blips on Screen in August'

"Five points, given the fact that it's August when people pay even less attention to things, doesn't mean a whole lot," Mr. Montalbano said. "There are stories in the newspapers about the union endorsements, but by and large, people are watching their reality shows and these things are just blips on the radar screen."

The fact that Mr. Bloomberg's camp fiercely competed for the endorsements of DC 37 and the WFP is an indication that it is concerned about the impact they will have closer to the election, he continued.

"If the labor unions do their jobs with their members—if they explain why they did this endorsement and what they like about the candidate— when it gets to October and closer to Election Day, that's when you see votes moving," Mr. Montalbano said.

Asked whether Mr. Thompson needed to close the gap significantly before the final couple of weeks to convince a union like the UFT that there was a potential upside to opposing a Mayor who has treated the union well in bargaining despite their disagreements on policy, he replied, "I think any union of that size and magnitude knows they have the opportunity to forge the perception [about the outcome of the race], not just observe and follow it."

'Should Be Able to Compete'

And so despite the backward move in the poll, Mr. Montalbano said of Mr. Thompson, "He has good people on board, he has a good plan, and if he follows that plan wisely he'll have enough money to compete. And typical of most elections, this one will take on a life of its own the last three or four weeks."

Political consultant George Arzt was less inclined to think so. He discounted the jump in Mr. Bloomberg's lead between the two Quinnipiac surveys, saying, "I'd never believed the [Mayor's diminishing poll number] because I'd seen other polls at the time showing 14."

He continued, "I don't think it's ever going to get to 10 unless Bloomberg makes a real bad mistake. The only way that Thompson can pick up [otherwise] is the Anybody But Bloomberg vote.

"But people are not sick of Bloomberg yet the way they were at the end of Koch's third term or at the end of Wagner's third term," said Mr. Arzt, who was Mayor Ed Koch's Press Secretary during his last three years in office. "They think it's a slightly elitist government, but they think the city is run well."

Left unsaid in that last comment was that Mr. Thompson has yet to inspire a widespread belief that he would offer the same competence. The fact that 51 percent of those surveyed by Quinnipiac had no opinion about him based on his performance as Comptroller either offers fertile territory for converts or reflects a fundamental problem with his candidacy.